How important is it to have a fast website and does that affect ads?

Your ads are greatly affected by your website speed.

Google will throttle your ads if it decides your "landing page experience" is bad. And the largest indicator of landing page experience is speed.

If your competitors have a faster website than yours, it's likely they'll be able to get better placements at a lower cost-per-click (CPC) than you can.

Slow website speed will also impact the bounce rate on your website (since cold leads are finnicky and just came from search results with a pile of options, so if they are struggling with your website then they might decide to go back and click on the next result from the search results). This lowers the conversion rate.

Here's how you can test your website speed in the eyes of Google's crawl bot:

1. Use this website speed analyzer tool.
2. Enter your website URL.
3. Click "Start Test"

Ideally your score should be in the green. If the load time is 3 seconds or less, you are in the clear.

Once you fix your website load speed, you will notice a drop in CPCs as well as a slight increase in CTR (due to better placements) and Conv. Rate (due to lower bounce rate, as well as higher-intent users who clicked at the top of the page where your better ad placement is).